Category: All Posts

Last Draft, First Draft

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Looking for an old newspaper clipping, that I still haven’t found, I came across another clipping. My first published newspaper story. It’s about the last man drafted to serve during the Vietnam War era from Westfield, MA. I remember being surprised by how little of what I’d written had been changed. Of course, now I see it needed more editing. For example, the lead should say "…drafted into the U.S. Army." Click the thumbnail picture to read.

Bible Tech

This week’s Boston Sunday Globe had an article about The Massachusetts Bible Society’s struggle to survive in the Internet Age:

The Massachusetts Bible Society, a 197-year-old organization that distributed Bibles to seamen during the war of 1812 and welcomed 19th-century immigrants to Boston’s docks with free Scriptures, has sold its downtown building, is about to close its wood-paneled bookstore, and is trying to reinvent itself for a world in which the latest theological treatises are just a mouse-click away.

If the link above to the full article doesn’t work (registration may be required) click here. Hey, look at that. Comic-books are mentioned…

… and a now-missing set of 1940s Bible stories published by the editors of DC Comics, has for years been housed at the Boston University School of Theology.

As I explained previously in this blog, during college I was an Evangelical Christian. Or at least I tried to be. Although I am no longer a church-goer, that doesn’t mean I don’t read the Bible. But these days I read it online.

Bible Link

Another previous post was about my new SanDisk flash drive with U3 software. Recently, a U3 version of a free program called Bible Link Basic became available. There are add-ons that cost money, but I’m a relatively casual Bible reader.

    Click here

Here’s a screen grab of the small toolbar that comes up when Bible Link is started. From the toolbar you can search the Internet or view local copies of two different versions of The Bible. Click the toolbar image to see a full-size copy of the Bible viewer. Additional translations are available for download at reasonable cost.

The reduced images of the viewer above show how you can navigate by dragging the numbers on the right; (1) for books, (2) for chapters, and (3) for verses. Another neat feature is you can either read just the New American Standard or King James version, or you can view both, one above the other.

So here already is another nifty U3 application for flash drives. I never quite saw the need for a PDA, but this approach to portable applications and data is making a convert of me.

Dilbert Has No Mouth

I’m not a gigantic fan of Dilbert.  I enjoy the strip, I almost never miss it, and I think it actually provides some valuable lessons for my son Eric, who’s a fan of it.  But for me it’s a bit impersonal.  Which is, I know, the way things are supposed to be in the workplace.  But still, like Beetle Bailey, I don’t feel a personal connection to Dilbert the way I do to Calvin and Hobbes, or Peanuts or, until a few years ago, Doonesbury.

It’s been a while since I checked Scott Adams’ blog, so a tip of the toupee to friend “Tom Tastewar” for pointing out this item.

As regular readers of my blog know, I lost my voice about 18 months ago.  Permanently. It’s something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia.  Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down in some people, usually after you strain your voice during a bout with allergies (in my case) or some other sort of normal laryngitis.  It happens to people in my age bracket.

Frankly, at first I thought it was a put-on.  It seemed too strange and ironic, because Adams draws Dilbert without a mouth.

Immediately I thought of idiot former disk jockey Rush Limbaugh’s deafness, which turned out to be induced by prescription drug abuse.  But Adams seems to be sincere, so I’ll take him at his word.  I guess I feel a bit embarrassed that I didn’t already know about this!